The best pricing strategy for your SaaS business will depend on your specific business model, target market, and competition. You’ll also want to test different pricing strategies to see which one works best for you. That said, feature-based pricing can be a very profitable way to price SaaS products. Here’s how it works. We’ll also include how to determine your cloud costs per feature so you can set profitable prices.

Amazon Athena is heralded for its simplicity, pay-per-query pricing, and speed. Others say Athena has its fair share of limitations, which could affect your overall analytics experience and quality of analyses. So, what is what? In this post, we’ll share what Amazon Athena does, compare it to Amazon Redshift, and share how to understand and control your Athena costs in AWS (with just one tool).

Does it seem like your cloud costs are always shifting with the winds? It could be because the cloud itself is in a state of rapid change and advancement. The best way to anticipate these changes is to stay on top of current cloud cost news trends.

Over the next five years, the cloud computing market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.3%. Cloud-based services are becoming increasingly popular with businesses of all sizes, contributing to the growth of this market. When you consider the other benefits involved, that makes a lot of business sense.

From 2022 to 2023, worldwide cloud spending is expected to increase to $597.3 billion, up from $491 billion in 2022. Year over year, that’s a 21.64% increase. Compare that to the 15.42% increase (at the time of writing) in the Nasdaq-100 Technology Sector Index, and you see a simple, inconvenient truth: Cloud spend is outpacing business growth by a substantial margin. It’s no wonder that cloud efficiency sits at the top of many companies’ priority lists.

The trend continues to accelerate - even faster now. Cloud computing was already booming before 2020. But in the following two years, remote work flourished, and cloud adoption soared. Some companies have since returned to the office. Others are adopting hybrid models, where staff work from home and in the office. Yet there’s more to the rise and rise of cloud computing than remote working.

A recent report found that managing cloud costs, alongside resource usage, is the most pressing cloud management challenge for the fifth straight year. This makes sense, considering respondents said a staggering 32% of their cloud budget went to waste in 2022 alone. It doesn't end there. The following FinOps statistics also demonstrate the value of the cloud for many organizations.

By now FinOps has proven its value — so much so that the web is full of helpful in-depth guides, broad overviews, bite-sized articles, and resource lists on the subject. But if you're preparing to pitch a FinOps program at your company, you need to convey only the most important points in a way that's both impactful and succinct. That's when it's time to call in the visuals.

You know this by now. You can only improve an area of your business if you measure its health and performance. Yet, rather than collecting every general finance metric possible, you’ll want to plan, collect, and analyze the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that’ll drive strategic decision-making. That means KPIs are a subset of metrics that are most relevant to your goals as a team. Here’s how to leverage the right KPIs as an FP&A team.

Cloud infrastructure and the applications it hosts generate millions of rows of raw data in short periods. Viewed in the context of everyday business activities, most of the data makes little sense. So many companies amass mountains of this type of data in data lakes and data warehouses, hoping to figure out how to use it later but end up never tapping into it.

It's been a rollercoaster ride at Twitter recently. News of layoffs with "50% higher than legally required" severance pay has dominated the news. But Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk is also trying to optimize cloud infrastructure costs. Some of the tactics used include refusing to pay a $70 million AWS bill and $8 million to a software services company. More on that below.

Merging two companies into one comes with several challenges. One of the most formidable endeavors is maintaining control over cloud costs while a cloud-to-cloud integration — essentially, taking the cloud environments of two companies and combining them into one — is taking place. One or both companies may not be tracking cost data, and even if they are, it’s highly unlikely that their cost-tracking strategies line up well enough to merge seamlessly.

Cloud financial management has become an increasingly sophisticated business function over the past few years, far beyond what many cloud stakeholders anticipated. As a result, many companies are unable to monitor and allocate cloud costs accurately. In 2022, Gartner estimates companies will waste as much as 30% of their cloud budgets due to this problem. A more holistic approach to cloud cost management is necessary to reduce waste and optimize cloud spending.

In 2006, Amazon Web Services (AWS) pioneered cloud computing as we know it today. And with about 34% of the market share, Amazon Web Services remains the largest cloud infrastructure provider today, followed by Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). AWS is a Cloud Service Provider (CSP). That means AWS builds, maintains, and continually improves multiple data centers worldwide and then rents the computing infrastructure out to other companies as needed, over the Internet.

In software engineering, measuring your performance gives you the knowledge you need to make informed decisions regarding your products, features, processes, and even your dev teams. Measuring also tells you if you’re on track to meet your engineering goals. Yet, with an abundance of tasks, data, and other information to keep track of, how do you decide on the right metrics to monitor?

Over the past few years, Kubernetes (K8s) has become the preferred method of orchestrating containers and microservices. Its self-healing, high scalability, and open-source nature make it appealing to a wide range of users. However, deploying, running, and scaling containerized applications and microservices with Kubernetes can be quite challenging. The Kubernetes community keeps growing, but there still aren’t that many experienced K8s engineers.

Managing cloud computing costs is a big deal right now. For instance, 60% of organizations say their cloud costs are higher (over 70%) than they should be, according to our State of Cloud Cost Intelligence report. Over the last five years, several other studies have shown that controlling cloud spend is a top cloud computing challenge. Yet almost all organizations acknowledge that moving more workloads to the cloud is a top cloud initiative in the next year.

We built CloudZero for a simple reason: Bring business fundamentals to cloud-driven organizations without stifling innovation. It sounds simple, but for years, the intrinsic complexities of the cloud and extrinsic pressures to grab SaaS market share made it near-impossible for businesses to achieve this. Until CloudZero.

All the major cloud providers allow users to attach business context to their infrastructure in some way. It’s this context that allows users to divide up their cloud bill into more easily digestible bites and keep track of cost trends for different resource types. Thorough cloud cost allocation gives companies the ability to make educated business decisions.

Snowflake’s scalable architecture, minimal latency, advanced analytics, simplified data handling, flexible pay-as-you-go model, and always-on security make the data cloud a top choice for many businesses. You can also purchase Snowflake resources on-demand or upfront. But if you struggle to control your Snowflake costs, you’re not alone. With the help of this guide, you’ll know how to better manage your Snowflake costs.

Picture this. Over 90% of organizations use the cloud in one form or another, according to O'Reiley's research. Cloud computing is so popular because of its flexibility. Because you can access cloud computing resources on-demand, you can automatically increase or decrease resource usage depending on your workload, which is incredibly appealing — and quite different from traditional IT infrastructure. In 2023, controlling cloud spend is one of the greatest challenges for cloud users today.